Twitter's Revamped Character Limit Is Finally Here

On Monday, Twitter rolled out substantial changes to how its character limit works.

These changes, first announced in May, are aimed at giving users more space to fit their thoughts into 140 characters, the limit for each tweet. Attachments like GIFs, pictures and polls will no longer count towards the restriction, nor will videos and quoted tweets.

Each of these items used to take up 23 characters in any given tweet. That's about 16% of each tweet — precious space on a platform whose brevity has inspired users to get creative with symbols, and has come to be one of its defining features.